58 THE \V A Y\v ARD PRESS E ITHER this department has, over a period of five years of heckling, rocked the news- paper business to its very foundations, so that copy desks and editors sit in terri- fied surveIllance over any items which Inight draw down our devastating dis- approval, or else we just can't read as well as we used to. \Vhatever the reason, when closing day comes around every three weeks or so, we find less and less material for sneering. We may have to cluse down the depart- ITIent entirely until we can secrete more venom, and then the papers would be sorry they got so Ï1nmaculate. Of course, one can always kid the Times when it gets frisky, as it does every so often like all good manic-de- pressives, or the TV orld- T ele granz when it goes Gorky or Heart-of-the- World. But, after all, this sort of nag- ging in time gets more tiresome than the objects themselves, and, if things get any worse (or, rather, any better) in newspaper-writing, we shall have to fill this space with a burlesque of this department itself, stressing those fea- tures which have come to be staples in our monthly philippic. When this time comes, we will call for suggestions from our readers, although God knows we could do it ourself. At this time of the year, especially, is the grist discouragingly small. There are the Christmas stories and the in- domitable optimisITI (last year, you may remember, according to the papers there was nobody who was not glutted with food and cheer on Christmas Day), and there are the summaries of "Most Important Events of the Past Year," which give a lot of reporters many happy hours in the office " " 1 . d 11 h . morgues. nCI enta y, t ere IS no more fascinating job than looking through the files for something, for, no matter whether you find what you are after or not, there are always dozens of other stories which you missed when they appeared, and, before you know it, an afternoon has gone and your eyes are tired. This is the time of year when strangely indefinite stories appear on the front pages, stories which, during more newsy periods, would appear In the "bulldog" editions destined for up-state or in what are known as the "special COMPLAINT SHORT AGE feature sections" of the Sunday papers. Thus, on the front page of the Tzmes on December 17, we find a red-hot news item headed "Christmas Shoppers Jam London Stores" which goes on to say that London stores are being jammed with Christmas shoppers. This is good to know, and we can't blame the Tinles for putting it as a Column 7 story on Page 1, for if they hadn't, we might have had something about strange Christmas customs in Poland. Here again we find ourself picking on the Times alone, because any de- viation froITI Spartan newspaper policy in the Ti1nes is more conspicuous than in the other, more easy-going journals. T HE TV urld- T elegranz solves the problem of writing a story when there is no story by simply repeating w hat has been said in the head and letting it go at that. This accounts for those little two-line things which sometimes appear at the bottom of its front-page columns and which can best be described by quoting. The heading says: "BELGIAN CABINET RESIGNS" and the story, dated Brussels, consists of: "The Cabinet has resigned." The heading: "FORESTS BLAZE IN MANI- TOBA" and the story, dated Winnipeg: "F orest fires were raging in Manitoba today." The head: "FATHER OF 10 HANGS HIMSELF" and the story: "Thomas Dembeck, 53, father of ten children, hanged himself yesterday from a rafter." In this last one, we get the news about the rafter and the father's naITIe in the story, so it wouldn't have ' .,,,)"!N t;:i ;ifli.;J;.r . <<, ,,,,", ' '\ ,.., . ; . ;...: : ( . ." 1"'. . ,: _ ,- , :::'. . ' , ' ' ... '7", _ '"::' )", . ;>",M .. . .., ,,' .. :. . . ' , f}f: :( ' 7:, t<,:" ", :,' " > }:"::'" " ',: , - , , .: , g , : ; : , . I it:.:. i ., ,' ( :.s:s- ,i . .t I r,'., :' ' ' f1j " .'.. ..., ). ,;'.. '>r ". . ,. ,; ";: " '1< '" <' fÇ' " ' .. ,.,' j - .,.' . : .r:L ;' :.;. jfo Ie: . ..t" ''' "r' ..,.....;.;,. .. i',. "t ,,:r:, '..: ." ", .\ " , "' 1J:; "':--..J' 'J' j,; t" '...> "w. '""'('1i"(.'" 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'j:: . aT hey l1'lUst have ch.ang-ed the cOlnbination since I was vice-president."